The Green Fog, created by filmmaker/cultural iconoclast Guy Maddin with co-directors Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, with composer Jacob Garchik and Kronos Quartet, pays homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s spellbinding Vertigo. Inventive and invigorating, this “San Francisco Fantasia” is lauded by the New York Times as “a marvel of film scholarship.” It’s also a lot of fun. Maddin, working with his Forbidden Room collaborators, set himself the challenge to remake Vertigo without using footage from the Hitchcock classic, creating a “parallel-universe version,” in his words. Using Bay Area footage from a variety of sources—studio classics, ‘50s noir, experimental films, and ‘70s prime-time TV—and employing Maddin’s mastery of assemblage, the result exerts the inexorable pull of Hitchcock’s tale of erotic obsession while paying tribute to the city of San Francisco. (Balcony)
A wonder of excavation and urban history.
- Ben Kenigsberg, The New York Times
Constructed with an eye for the bizarre and the joyously perverse.
- Jonathan Romney, Film Comment
Fun is the order of the day: the movie's affect is puckish and surreally funny, quite different from Hitchcock's bleak romantic tragedy.
- David Cairns, MUBI Notebook
At times, the playfulness reaches moments of sublime, unlikely beauty... That’s the magic of The Green Fog. It envelops you and pulls you into its own world, teaching you to see again.
- Bilge Ebiri, Village Voice
A brilliant exercise in meta-narrative, which raises questions galore about reality and representation, time and space, genre and gender, individual and urban identity, cinematic suture and casting, etc.
- Geoff Andrew, Sight & Sound
(Available to download after screening date)